So this happened

And I am still mad

The weather here is awful — hot, humid, nasty — and though I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks with famously vile summers, I have lost the ability to move comfortably through this soup.

We decided to run errands before the heat became oppressive, and one of our stops was a discount store (that is perhaps two steps above a Dollar General), where we grabbed things like a new braided rug for the foyer and some socks and an electric pepper grinder (because they didn’t have a manual one on the shelves).

In other words, we bought useful crap.

I made it to the checkout first, and saw that one lane over the cashier was bending over — looking for something, I thought. But then she said something about not feeling good and the next time I looked over, I couldn’t see her any more. She’d sat down.

The air in the store wasn’t stifling but it was close. I went to grab a guy who looked official (he wore a store vest and was talking on the phone). He immediately cut me off to tell me that he was on the phone, so I thanked him for the information and said that while he was on the phone, one of his employees was on the floor. He hurried over, and a woman with a perfect blonde bob who’d been waiting in the ill woman’s line looked at me, and said, “I guess I need to go to another lane.”

Have I mentioned I misplaced my filter? I said, “Are you fucking kidding me?” because her having to move to get checked out seemed beside the point. I have had heat exhaustion and you need to move quickly to help a person cool off. Wet cloths on the head or neck are great, plus a little cool water for them to drink (but not too much).

While Blonde Bob looked aghast, I turned toward an aisle of bottled water but one of the other employees appeared holding one out. My husband, a retired paramedic, walked up and I waved him over and he offered help but the woman said no, she would be OK. Another emplyee reached up and turned off the light on her register so no one else would be disappointed in the service in that lane. After a few minutes, the woman stood and moved with a colleague toward an office (I think) where maybe the air conditioning worked better.

Meanwhile, I was fuming. I have zero medical training but common sense and decency say you don’t step over people if they’re on the ground, you don’t make wisecracks about someone’s ill health, and if you cannot render aid, you step the hell back. I would say most people in the store didn’t realize what was going on. I might not have had I not been standing nearby. But I could not get over Blonde Bob’s dismissal of the whole event as an inconvenience to her. When people go on social media and make fun of vulnerable people, I sometimes wonder if they’ve never had a drug addict in the family, or a drunk, or they’ve never had bad health in public, so they simply don’t know how to act.

But they should know how to act. It’s not that hard. A 6-year old would know what to do. I’m not going to make this a bigger thing than it already is, but empathy is what greases the wheels of the kind of place I want to be. And I hope for Blonde Bob a little bit of it.